A website focusing on Civil War cavalry, primarily oriented on the Union regular cavalry regiments. Will feature biographical sketches, discussions of engagements, unit histories, letters, journals, and a database of those who served in the regiments during the Civil War as I'm able to compile them.

About Me

I am a recently retired Army officer and amateur Civil War historian. I focus my studies on the Regular cavalry regiments because I served in one of them and because they haven't received the in-depth coverage that their volunteer brethren have.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Among the many neglected items of this blog is the blogroll, which I will endeavor to have cleaned up by the weekend. One of the links I erroneously thought had been posted is Dave Powell's excellent, Battle of Chickamauga blog. Dave is the expert on this battle, and is doing a great job with the blog. I'm looking forward to a great deal of education and enjoyment from this one.

Wow! I had no idea it had been nearly three weeks since my last post. I will refrain from making any comments about being back in the saddle, since the post of the same name is still drawing daily comments from some Asian-language porn site.

I'm back, and finally willing and able to post again. The master's degree is at long last complete, papers and classes complete, and attention can be turned to family and more enjoyable things than school. I still hope to complete a second master's in history, but plan to take a few months in the interim to relax a bit.

My efforts to elicit commentary from anyone from or related to Norwich have been unsuccessful, so I suppose AMU wins that discussion by default....

Book draft two finally continues updates and editing. Several new sources popped up in the interim thanks to Dr. Rick Sauers, so more research is required. And I'm still working on a few things like the rest of the brief 3rd Cavalry history started before everything went awry a few months back. I've also been poking around a bit about Benjamin S. Roberts and William P. Sanders, and should have posts on them here in the near future. Not to mention the Kelly's Ford blog I've so neglected in the interim.

I haven't had a great deal of time for leisure reading, but am in the midst of two interesting books related to the war. The first is Jeffry Wert's excellent Cavalryman of the Lost Cause (found on Amazon here), which will likely prove the definitive biography on Jeb Stuart for years to come. Indeed, it was an anecdote from this book that lead me back to studying Sanders. The second book is The War Department in 1861 - A Study in Mobilization and Administration by A. Howard Meneely. A reprint of a book originally published in 1928, this has been a very informative work. Meneely provides a very even-handed look at the War Department at the beginning of the war, maintaining an objective view of the people and the situation without jumping to conclusions to demonize or seek scapegoats.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The discussion I started here a while back about graduate degrees in military history has resulted in a good bit of discussion over time. Several valid points and concerns have been raised, but the input has been very one-sided. American Military University students and alumni appear to be very content with their programs, while there has been litle to no input from either current students or slumni of the Norwich program. I would greatly prefer to have inputs from both sides, is there anyone out there willing to speak up?